Tools for Inspired Living: How to keep feeling good about ourselves, the times, and the world we are living in right now.

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The Cure For Money Madness

How do we manage to feel good about our finances in these challenging times?

Here are 10 tips on how to survive today’s economy, quoted from Spencer Sherman on his website (I especially love his point 8):

1) Remember to take a Money Breath whenever you’re feeling stressed or fearful about your money situation or about the world. Just make the exhale twice as long as the inhale and say at the end of the exhale “May my money wisdom increase.”

2) I urge you to put your credit cards in a drawer until Thanksgiving like my wife and I are doing. Use cash for all purchases, or, if you have to, use checks or debit cards. Using cash reorders your priorities and reduces your spending. It’s much more difficult to put down five 20’s for a fancy dinner than just fling down the plastic. Try going cardless until January 1st.

3) Review your spending intentions and really think about which spending adds the most value and which you could easily live without.

4) Put some cash into a shoebox for savings, even if it’s only $1 per day.

5) Put some cash into a shoebox for charity, even if it’s only $1 per day. Saving for yourself and for charity cultivates and increases your sense of sufficiency and generosity; it’s impossible to be fearful when you’re in these two states.

6) Keep repeating your Curative Money Message (the message that is the opposite of one of the unproductive money messages you received as a child) in the morning and evening to yourself and take one action each week that will support your message.

7) Ask yourself whether you’d prefer to be a billionaire in terrible health or homeless with your current health?

8) Have a conversation with your spouse or an objective friend about how to double your income in the next 12 months. The opportunities are the most abundant in times like this. It’s this kind of thinking that will keep you in your heart and less gripped to your reactive thinking.

9) Stop listening to all newspaper, radio and TV news for a week. My wife and I are doing this now. Give your mind a break from hearing that the financial world is melting down completely and you have to do something radical today. Also, take a break from negative conversations with others.

10) If you have investments or cash, this is an opportunity to buy things like U.S. and international equities at low prices and to sell bonds, for example, at relatively high prices. Also, make sure you are really diversified in your 401k plan.